This will be a short post today. Day before yesterday I began to get the symptoms of a cold, yesterday they came on strong, and today they linger. I may be a little better. Maybe.
So, yesterday and today I took life easy. I typed edits in Adam Of Jerusalem. I followed the stock market and made a few trades. In the evening I read four more chapters in AOJ to Lynda. I didn’t do any of my exercises yesterday, and don’t plan on doing any today. Yesterday I also went to the sun room to read, though I think I slept more than read. I hope to do the same today.
It’s been nearly two years since I had a cold. As I’m essentially a home body nowadays, I’m not sure where I got it. Perhaps it was going Monday to the Martin Luther King memorial service at our church. I didn’t speak up close with anyone; perhaps it was in the air.
I’m hoping that by tomorrow, Saturday, I’ll be back to 80%, and to full strength and health on Sunday.
Somewhere in this house, most likely in one of two places, I have a list started of blog posts I want to do. The list is on paper, one of the pads I want to use up rather than just discard. Do you think this morning, my regular day for blogging, I can find it? Of course not.
Instead of whatever I was thinking of for today, I’ll just post a stream-of-thought thing. What popped into my head was: I still haven’t found my new normal in retirement.
I have many things I should be doing. De-cluttering is a key one. Lynda has started on some de-cluttering, in a small way only but it’s a start. I’ve been working on it for a while, but haven’t done anything major for a while.
My main decluttering has been a little printing I did. How is that decluttering, you ask? It was four pages for the members of my new critique group. I printed them on the backs of old printed pages. I have two stacks of these, which are somewhat unobtrusive piles in two places, one quite large the other small. But, since I brought the pages back home with me, you might ask how is that decluttering? Once I incorporate their comments into my chapter, I’ll discard them into recycling. This is a departure from the past, where I kept all such critique sheets. No more.
Also yesterday I printed my completed novel, Adam Of Jerusalem, for my last editing pass through it. All 217 sheets are on reused paper. So, once I finish with this, it will be taken to recycling as well. The pile I pulled all these sheets from may in fact look a little smaller.
Today is a holiday, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But now that I’m retired, it’s the same as other week days except the stock market is closed. I’m free to do whatever I want. I don’t even have to prepare any food, as we have left-overs from the prior cooking.
So what am I going to do? I should try to read 100 pages in the novel, editing as I go. I will try to find that list of blog post, and put it where I can find it when I need it. I’ll hit the elliptical, and try to do 1.2 miles on it in 0.2 mile increments. I’ll walk outside, hopefully my 2.4 mile route. It would be nice to read something for leisure, maybe something out of the large magazine pile (which will be multi-tasking since it will also count as decluttering). We may also head into town for a noon service celebrating MLK’s life. We’ll see.
Tomorrow will be another day into retirement. Perhaps, with the stock market open and having trades to make and watch, it will feel a little closer to a new normal.
I have been waiting on posting my 4th quarter sales results until one sale at Apple via Smashwords to fully post. That happened yesterday, so here I am. I’ll post the sales table and comment on it below.
6 sales in the 4th quarter, 48 for the entire year, down from 2018.
Only six sales in the 4th quarter, and only 48 for the whole year. That’s understandable. I did almost no promotion in 2018 and had only one new publication, The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2. With no promotion activity and almost no new releases, it’s understandable that sales were low.
Of those 48 sales, 27 were print books I sold personally. The rest were mostly at Amazon, both print and e-books. Two were from pass-through vendors via Smashwords.
Maybe that’s enough commentary for 2018. Looking ahead to 2019, hopefully more new publications, a couple of author events, and some other promotion will make a different.
So, I think it was last Thursday that I started the second round of edits on my novel Adam Of Jerusalem. I completed the first round in mid-December, but had to put it aside as family and Christmas was upon me. I printed it again and put it in the notebook. There were two places where I wanted to work in some backstory. I actually did that around Jan 2-3, but didn’t re-print.
“Adam Of Jerusalem” is a prequel to “Doctor Luke’s Assistant”, and is the first in my church history novel series.
When I read it for the first round of edits, I wasn’t happy with it. Too many places with clunky phrasing. Too many places where my meaning wasn’t clear. And something about the plot that wasn’t quite right. I had begun reading it aloud to my wife, but somewhere, maybe about 95 pages in, I quit that due to my unhappiness with it and went to another part of the house to read it to myself.
Saturday was a rain day, so I didn’t walk. I took two or three hours out in our sun room, in the nice cool temperature, to read around seventy pages. I had a lot of editing marks, but in general I was much more pleased with it than I was a month ago.
Sunday, after church and lunch, and with the weather not particularly conducive to walking, I again went to the sun room and began reading/editing. I got up to page 105 (of a 210 page manuscript, and felt like I was re-reading something I had read the day before. I flipped back fifty pages and, sure enough, I had covered the same Bible story earlier in the book, the one from Acts Chapter 5, where the apostles are imprisoned but miraculously released over-night.
How had I possibly done that? It’s a good story, sure, but to use it in two different places as if it were two different events? Looking back, I figure I must have had a time-gap in my writing. I had put the story in, written some more stuff, taken time away from the book (for whatever reason), then gotten back to it and, forgetting the story was already in there, written it again.
The treatment of the two stories is similar. My protagonist, Adam, is involved in the arrest of the apostles. The first time he was a simple bystander, then sent to check on the condition of the apostles after they were flogged. The second time he was sent by the high priest to facilitate the arrest, to try to convince the apostles not to make a scene when they were arrested.
I stopped my editing and tried to figure out what to do. One of the stories had to go. Which place did it fit in naturally with the rest of the narrative, and which was better written? I’ve found in the past that, normally when you write something twice (such as happened to me three decades ago when I began writing by had a professional paper, lost it, started again, then found the original pages), the first time is better. Would that be the case here? And what to do with the “space vacated” by deleting one of the two?
As I looked at the book, I decided either place would work. To make it consistent with the order in the book if Acts, I would have to either use the first instance or make a slight change in another place to make the chronology work. As to which of the two versions of the repeated story are better, I’ll have to read them both carefully and make that decision.
As to the words lost, I hate to make the book shorter. It’s only a little over 70,000 words, which is shorter than I wanted. I stopped there because the it seemed the story was complete. Why pad it with extra words? But now, to lose words? That’s not what I prefer.
So, last night was a brainstorming night. It didn’t take long for an idea to come to me. Not all my scenes come out of Acts, naturally. I could add an extra-biblical scene where the apostles are confronted in the temple by Jewish leaders, much the same way they confronted Jesus. It gives me some chance to work in some more teaching of Jesus as the apostles debate the Pharisees, Sadducees, chief priests, and teachers of the law.
I went to the place in the manuscript where the first story was, and began typing the new scene. I was only a couple of hundred words into it when I quit for the night. But I finished pleased. Pleased that I had a plan that seems good to me; pleased that I made a start on implementing that plan; and pleased that I’m well into editing.
Oh, and, I found two potential beta readers for my novel, both in my target audience. I won’t give it to them until I have this round of edits done, hopefully in about two weeks.
I didn’t mention in my last post that I was planning to go to a writing event on Wednesday. It was the regular monthly meeting of Village Writers and Poets, a group centered in my city that meets more or less monthly. As this meeting is from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., I wasn’t able to go while I was working. I knew one of the writers making a presentation, which is why I wanted to go to this particular meeting.
Several different writing events occur in the ARC: Artists’ Retreat Center, in Bella Vista. That’s where I was on Wednesday Jan 9, 2019. (can’t find copyright holder of this photo, so hope it’s alright to share.)
They occasionally have Sunday afternoon meetings. That was the one I attended back in February 2018. The leader asked me if I was interested in doing an author presentation, and we’re now trying to figure out a date.
At the read-around time, since I was new to most of them, they asked me to tell them something of myself and my writing. I tried to explain my Genre Focus Disorder to them, told of myself and my writing. Since I hadn’t brought anything to share, I recited “The Beginning of a Special Day”, the first poem in Daddy-Daughter Day. One thing I told them was that I had a new finished novel and was about to begin the second round of edits on it.
I came home after the meeting and two other errands, went for a 2-mile walk, and fixed supper. That evening, while watching television, I remembered what I had said: “Tonight I’ll start the second round of edits on my most recent novel.” So I went down to The Dungeon, took the notebook with the manuscript, and came back upstairs to work on. I read the first chapter, made some notations. Soon it was bedtime.
The first slice was good. Better have another to be sure.
Today is a rainy day in Bella Vista, as predicted. I can’t go for my walk. I’ve been on the elliptical three times, though need to do it three more times to get my steps in for today. I decided to make banana bread, the firs time ever. And, I went out to the sun room with a mug of coffee and the manuscript, and began some serious edits. I’m on Chapter 5 now. I just identified the place where I’ll work in a little more backstory for the main character.
This feels good. I wasn’t pleased with the book when I read it through the first time, making simple edits. Some places seemed unclear, not explained well enough. I’m making a few clarifying edits. Nothing major; mainly adding speaker tags, sometimes an extra clause or two to make things clearer.
At the rate I’m going, I could be done in a week. Then a few days of typing, then one more read-through with, hopefully, minor edits. Then it’s ready for publishing. Way behind the schedule I’d hoped for, but still a viable addition to my collection.
What’s next to start, in my multi-tasking world? I want to write letters to my three oldest grandchildren. I think I’ll start that tonight. And, I need to make a list of blog posts I want to make, possibly scheduling them. If I get that done by Sunday, I’ll be happy.
Well, you would think that, after almost a week of retirement (five days, actually, today being the beginning of the sixth), I would have accomplished much on writing. You would be wrong.
I actually started the year spending more time on genealogy and stock trading than anything else. Stock trading because it’s a new year, I needed new spreadsheets, and I needed to be active in it and try to make some money. Genealogy because I love to do it so much, and I had some new leads—or rather a little bit older leads I’d been holding off on until retirement. Following those leads now.
I’ve been holding off on writing also because I had much to do in life, and I knew retirement was coming. But retirement came, and I felt that I needed to get a few other things done first. Lynda is ill, with the flue, and it doesn’t seem to be going away quickly. Perhaps she had bronchitis as well. So I’m having to do some things for her. It’s not a burden, however. I’m glad the family sickness passed me by and I’m able to pick up the load.
I haven’t been totally absent on writing, however. A few days ago I saw a notice in a Bella Vista Facebook page about a new writing critique group someone want to form. I contacted her, and it looks as if it will happen, a once-a-month group at her house. I’m looking forward to that.
Last night I pulled out the manuscript of Adam Of Jerusalem, and began going through it looking for places where I’d marked I needed to add Adam’s backstory. Found them, and began to work on that backstory. I have the notebook next to me, in The Dungeon, and will work on it today.
These are somewhat feeble efforts, however. I wanted to get some other things done first. I felt that writing time would come shortly, and I needed to get my family budget up to date first, then file receipts, then clean up certain clutter stacks, then start a jigsaw puzzle (yes, did that yesterday). Saturday I made wonderful progress on all of these, which gave me freedom of mind to do a little on writing yesterday. Oh, yes, somewhere along the way I knew I needed to start doing some more healthy things. I’ve been doing that, though I need to ramp it up some still. Over time, over time.
Another thing I did was work some (on Saturday, I think it was), on the outline/programming of a Life Group lesson series my co-teacher and I had discussed. I like the way it’s coming together. It concerns Jesus’ activities during Holy Week. Three of the planned lessons might be a little thin on teachable/discussable material, so I’m doing a little more research on them. I should finish that today.
The last thing I’ve done is try to plan out what exactly I’m going to write in 2019. I have a list of things. I don’t know if it’s complete yet, and it’s certainly not prioritized. It reflects my Genre Focus Disorder; it reflect the fact that I have much I want to write; it also reflects that I now see myself with more time to write than I ever had before. I intend to work on that list this week, and maybe have it in shape to report it on my Friday blog.
Planning is fine, but doing is better. Time to leave this and post it, and get to my other work. See you all on Friday.
My first official day of retirement was January 1, 2019. Having gone into the office the day before, and actually having done some meaningful work that day, Tuesday the 1st seemed more like the holiday I would have as a working man rather than a retirement day. We saw our daughter’s family off around 10:30 a.m., then we alternated resting and cleaning the rest of the day. We said we wouldn’t clean until Tuesday, but a few things were obviously easy, so we did it. That night we watched episodes of our favorite show, The Curse of Oak Island on the History Channel.
So Wednesday the 2nd was the first true retirement day. I was up around 6:15 a.m., got coffee, and headed to The Dungeon. I opened my brokerage programs, and realized I hadn’t set up my trading spreadsheet for 2019. I did that in a little more than an hour, and was ready when the market opened. After that, what to do? I read e-mails, Facebook, checked 23andMe, got breakfast, and watched the market.
I decided to work on my genealogy pursuits, and began better assimilation of data I’ve accumulated on the Penson family. Florence Elizabeth Penson married William Henry Foreman and gave birth to Bert Foreman, my new-found birth grandfather. That became my work for the rest of the day—along with watching the market. I took time to clean up Christmas stuff strewn across the work table in the storeroom. The evening was devoted to TV and reading. Thus ended a first, delightful day of retirement.
And, through the day, I had some e-mails for CEI Engineering. Since I have a contract with them for limited work, I still have my CEI phone and computer. The phone will soon be mine, but the computer will some day go back to them. One e-mail, from my former supervisor, included a request to do something, so I get to charge a little time to them. Just a 1/4 hour, but I’ll get paid for it. The extra income is something I’m looking forward to.
Yesterday, Thursday, wasn’t much different, except that I slept until almost 7:30 a.m. I watched the market and made one trade. I kept working on the Penson genealogy data. We did more clean-up, and Lynda did some laundry. She’s still not over the flu she caught just after Christmas, and her cough is terrible. We continued to eat leftovers, and the refrigerators are more or less back to normal. I cleaned out several things yesterday.
In the evening I worked on the outline for a series of Life Group lessons titled A Walk Through Holy Week. My co-teacher suggested this as something he’d like to do someday. A couple of months ago I looked into it, and realized we would never be able to teach it all in one Spring season. Last night I divided it into six parts, and planned the lessons for Part 1, which we will begin teaching in February this year. I still have some planning to do into two or three of the lessons, and will do so tonight.
So here it is, Friday January 4. I got up just after 7:00 a.m., which I think I’ll try to make my regular time. I made coffee, sat with Lynda a bit (she’s still coughing much and hard), called in one of her prescriptions, made a grocery list, and went to The Dungeon. Market futures are up, so it looks like a good opening. A Word document concerning the Penson family is open, and I’ve made some entries into it. And here I am, working on my regular Friday blog.
Truth is, I don’t yet know what my retirement routine will be. I have so many things I want to accomplish. My main January task is supposed to be inventorying my trunkful of Stars and Stripes, passed down to me from my dad. Perhaps I’ll get to that today. I’m going to make a grocery run, help out with more laundry, finish this Penson genealogy for now, finish the Life Group lessons work, and then, who knows? Maybe some reading. Oh, yes, I’ve been doing some of that in the evenings, in magazines I’ve collected but intend to read and not keep.
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I’m soon to retire: at the end of the month, the end of the year, the day I turn 67. That will be my last day in the office. To say I’m looking forward to retirement would be the understatement of the last decade.
But, during this last month or two, I find myself very unsettled. What will my retirement look like? I’ll write more books, study more genealogy, write those family histories I’ve been gathering, write the Bible studies I’ve developed and taught, and work on the clutter accumulated during 45 years of adulthood, almost 43 years of marriage. There’s no doubt I’ll keep busy. Plus, my company has asked me to enter into a contract with them for limited services, averaging not more than 10 hours per week. So I’ll keep my hand in civil engineering.
My unsettledness has come from not knowing what to do in my last two months as a fulltime employee. And, my problem hasn’t been at work, where I’ve stayed busy. The problem has been at home. A year ago, in the evenings, after supper and a little conversation with Lynda, I would head to The Dungeon, and would work on one of my avocational pursuits for a couple of hours, coming upstairs to leave a little time to read before going to bed.
The last two months, however, I decided to forego my time in The Dungeon and just sit upstairs with Lynda, watching television, talking, and perhaps doing a few things. Actually, now that I think about it, this has been going on for at least four months. My reasoning: It won’t be long before I’ll have the daytime hours to do these things. Let them go for a while. Whether retirement really gives me all the time I need for all the things I’d like to do is yet to be seen
So, I was only able to do one editing pass through my novel, taking it from first draft to second draft. I’ve done some genealogy work upstairs, including filing or discarding loose papers. To multitask while watching TV, I’ve been doing crossword puzzles, clipped years ago from newspapers (when we still took the paper) by Lynda for my use. They are coming in handy now. I’ve done quite a few, and have many more to do as well.
This will all change. Today I’m working my 5th-to-last day. I work all this week, take next week off as a combo of holidays and vacation, then work Monday Dec 31. at 5:00 p.m. I will walk out in triumph, thinking back on a career well-spent, and thinking ahead to a retirement full of creative and fulfilling pursuits.
For some time I’ve been aware of Fletcher Prouty, and that he had a story to tell in the JFK assassination. He was mentioned in Oliver Stone’s movie JFK (Donald Sutherland’s character “X”). He’s been in other books or articles about the assassination. Yet, I’d never read anything he actually wrote about it.
A disappointing read, though it will stay in my library for a while.
So, when I was at Barnes & Noble one time and saw his book JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, I naturally bought it. I had it for close to a year before it found its way to the top of the reading pile, a pile I haven’t had much success at reducing recently.
Alas, I was disappointed in it. All this time hoping he wrote about the assassination, only to find his book was barely worth reading.
First, his story. Prouty was in the Army Air Corps in WW2, having a variety of assignments during the war and right after. During the Cairo and Teheran conferences in late 1943, he was pilot for delegations attending the conference, particularly the Chinese delegation—all except for the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai Shek and his wife. He starts his narrative there, saying decisions made at the Cairo conference had implications in Vietnam and later. The Cold War, he said, started at Cairo and Teheran, when the USA and England teamed with the Chinese in silent battle against the USSR.
Then, he says he was aware that, when the Japanese surrendered, all the war materiel being accumulated on Okinawa had to go somewhere, and it was all taken to Hanoi to help Vietnam, then one country and led by Ho Chi Mihn, in its war against the lingering French colonists. That materiel would eventually be used against the USA.
The problem, Prouty said, was the US intelligence services, first the OSS then the CIA, ventured far outside the field of intelligence gatherings into covert operations. In Vietnam, those operations were keeping things fomenting in a country that was, at best, loosely a country in fact, so that attention would go there. The domino theory of nations falling to the communists was but a smokescreen for the CIA’s real work, says Prouty.
It’s all tied in to the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. The CIA keeps things roiling in different parts of the world. The USA needs to be prepared, so keeps buying military hardware. Industrialists thus profit, and taxpayers lose. That sort of makes sense, but I don’t believe he fully makes the case.
My father-in-law took this photo in Houston TX on Nov 21, 1963, the day before the assassination. He snuck in with the press photographers.
As I’m reading, I’m wondering how this ties to the JFK assassination. Prouty finally gets to that. He makes a big deal about a National Security Memorandum which shows that Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam, a slow withdrawal from our troop strength of 16,000 down to none over a three year period. This went against what the CIA, by this time a strong power in the government, wanted. So they assassinated Kennedy, who had said in casual conversation he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.
Prouty doesn’t make his case well. Oh, he talks about this agent and that, this operation and that, showing how they weren’t meant to do anything but promote unrest in Vietnam. But he doesn’t say how the CIA accomplished the assassination. How was Oswald involved, or was he involved at all, if it was a CIA plot? Who were the shooters, and how did they get away unseen? How is it that the Warren Commission uncovered none of this? An enquiring reader wants to know.
Prouty’s book is poorly written. The NSM mentioned earlier is covered over and over in the book. Each time Prouty gives us the full story about it. He’ll say something like “…as covered in NSM #268, which concerned troop withdrawals from Vietnam by the end of 1964…” He does this over and over. It’s as if he doesn’t trust his readers to read about this NSM the first time and understand what it covered thereafter throughout the book. He does this over and over, acting as if his readers were two yea- olds who needed to have the same thing explained to them many times. He does this with many things in the book.
He had some important things to say, but, having finished the book back in August of this year, those important things are already fading from my memory. And that’s not a good testimony for a non-fiction book.
If I could talk with the author, I would say, “Mr. Prouty, sir, you blew it. You had a good story to tell—at least I think you do, but you got off in the weeds and didn’t trust your readers. Hence, I can’t recommend your book.”
Who should read this? Only die-hard Kennedy assassination researchers and students who want to leave no related book unread.
This book will stay on my shelf, with other Kennedy books. I might even read it again, in my retirement, and see if I can glean more and better information from it. For right now, it’s going to get a mere two-stars from me on an Amazon and Goodreads review.
On Nov. 7, 2018, my mother-in-law, Esther May (Moler) Cheney Barnes left this world and entered her heavenly dwelling. She had been ill for some time, with her physical condition rapidly deteriorating in the two weeks prior to her death. She was 93 years old.
Esther grew up in Meade Kansas, a rural area southwest of Dodge City. As a child and teenager during the Great Depressions, she had memories of hard times and dust storms. She graduated high school in 1943, went to junior college, then was pressed into service teaching, as there was a shortage of teachers.
With her children, around 1950
In 1946 she married Wayne Cheney of nearby Fowler Kansas. They had three children (one of whom died shortly after childbirth) and Esther miscarried at least twice. She and Wayne divorced around 1953. Esther remarried in 1986, to Chester Barnes. Chester had five children, three of whom were by his first wife; he and she divorced and he wasn’t close to the children. He had two daughters by his second wife, and these became like additional daughters to Esther.
She was city clerk for the City of Meade for 35 years, retiring in 1988. Her starting salary was $0.99 per hour. She had a difficult life as a single mom. For some time she and the children lived with Esther’s parents in Meade. Esther paid rent to them, however. It was a difficult life, with the three of them sharing a bedroom, Esther working her main job plus other jobs such as babysitting and washing to help make ends meet. She got through it, however. And her children grew up to become responsible adults.
In her later years; she still played occasionally
Esther was a rock-solid Christian. She was saved at a very early age, before memories carried into adulthood, and lived a consistent Christian walk after that. She joined the Church of the Nazarene (the church of her parents and grandparents), and, wherever she lived, this was her home church. Despite her financial hardships, she was a faithful tither. Her ministries in the church were pianist, organist, choir member, board member, and Sunday school teacher.
In 1988 she and her second husband retired to Benton County Arkansas, where Chester had been given a few acres. There they had a retirement farm where they raised cattle, ostriches, and emus. In 1996 they left this farm for full retirement in Bentonville. Chester died in 1999, and Esther was a widow for her last 19 years. She gradually “downsized”, from her house to an apartment to an independent living apartment to living with us for a few years, then finally to an assisted living facility in Bella Vista, about a mile from our home. It was there that she seemed happiest.
Wither her two oldest great-grandchildren, Ephraim and Ezra
Esther leaves a good legacy for her family. She knew her two grandchildren and four step-grandchildren. She knew four great-grandchildren, and enjoyed them being part of her life when they came for a visit.
Our family will miss her. At the same time, we are rejoicing that she has reached her heavenly home, safe in the arms of Jesus.
